Presence vs. Awareness

Presence.

What is it?

There are many workshops that deal with presence.  Practicing it, creating different kinds of presence.

But there is only one kind of presence - either you are in the room or you are not.  It’s digital,a binary.  Either the food is in your belly or it is not.  Either the whisky is in your glass or it is not.  Either you’re pregnant or you’re not.

If we are to look at the etymology of the word (and a little part of me dies when I do this), we see that presence comes from Latin praesentia - “a being before”.  The origins of the word have nothing to do with awareness.  Before...in front of...location...place...space...either you are before someone or not.

Does this mean that practicing presence is an exercise in punctuality?  You are either in the studio or not.  Punctuality is something that many dancers could practice.  Oh, the irony...we of time based art have a hard time showing up at the correct time.

What people really mean when they say presence is awareness.  When people say that someone is not very present, they mean that someone’s awareness is on something other than what they themselves are focused on.  Differing awarenesses.

Seeing dancers who are not very “present” on stage... well, that’s impossible.  If they weren’t present, you couldn’t see them.  They appear “not present” because their awareness is elsewhere.  Frequently inexperienced dancers seem “not present”.  Their awareness is probably taken up by nervousness, or anticipation of messing up the choreography.  Their awareness is of the moment they are in, but their awareness of that moment is of a different variable than what the viewer is aware of.  The nervous dancer is aware of his or her panic about the upcoming moments, getting that lift right, or freaked out in an open improvisation because s/he is “stuck” center stage in a ball facing the floor.  It seemed like a brilliant choice 2 minutes ago...what do I do now?

The “unpresent” dancers, though, have not disappeared.  They are just focused on something else than the viewer is.

Injuries can also come from lack of “presence”.  This, though, is a result of a difference in awareness.  Imagine a contact jam.  Person X is very present in (or aware of) his sensations - the weight on his torso, the sweat of his partner, the exertion of his muscles etc.  He is so caught up in his sensory perceptions, that his awareness doesn’t see the heel headed towards his face.

BAM!

Heel meets face.  Ouch.  If he really weren’t present, then he would have not been hit.  If his awareness were outwards, he might have been able to avoid the incoming heel.  His awareness could have changed his presence to another location and avoided the calcaneal(is that a word?) collision.

presence, awareness, presence, awareness...

By conflating the two terms, and I would say that people favor presence, giving it greater value, we are favoring the mind over the body.

Maybe this is a Cartesian remnant, a vestigial thought held over from the Enlightenment - I think therefore I am - favoring the mind over the body.

Somatic - Compositional

Now – Future

Need – Want

Have to React – Want to React

Body – Space

Kinesphere – Spatial

Sensing Self –Sensing Space

Reaction to Self – Reaction to Other

For Self – For Other

Solo – Group

Self – Other

I – We

Compensating – Creating

Reacting to Change – Creating Change

Following - Leading

Habitual – Non-habitual

Unconscious – Conscious

Automatic – Forced

Exothermic – Endothermic

Anatomical – Cerebral

Poetic – Formulaic

Inner – Outer

Process – Product

Observational – Generative

Subject – Object

Instinctual – Cognitive

Fast - Slow

Evolving – Abrupt

a list of binaries generated during my third semester of my MA SODA at the HZT in Berlin

Tour vs. Make

Hot off the mental press, coming at you live. As I ponder more and more of late about what to do in life, what path to follow or forge, all due to grad school and the birth of my first child, I think now about a binary of touring vs. making work. Is it even a binary? All these thoughts could be because I am just lazy and don't want to do the work of getting my work out there. Writing grants, making packets, sending them out, schmoozing with presenters is a lot of work. Work that scares me. Maybe scares me is the wrong word.

I see other artists who tour and get presented and looking at their work, I don't understand why they were presented, why the director of theater X gave them a 6 month residency. Must be in the documentation the artist presented, or maybe the kind of work s/he does is more easily marketable. Could be that my work is just not interesting. Don't get bitter, don't get bitter, don't get bitter.

And grad school, context, context, context. Shit in on context smell, a different context helps make food. So maybe I need to rewrite all my performance blurbs so the context is sexier. And then write the grants, make the packets, and hound the presenters. But for whom am I making the work? Because I work in a time based medium that can be viewed as performative, does that mean the work is made for other people? How many painters make work for themselves, and have studios full of canvasses not meant for general consumption?

And now a child! What a wonderful bundle of joy and confusion. Her laughter, smiles and cries make everything, all my frustrations disappear. But then they come back. Provide, provide, provide...that is what a parent, a father is supposed to do. Hack away at performing, etc to make money to provide. But then touring could conflict with schooling. School is still a couple years off yet.

So, do I finish this schooling, get my MA then jump out of the artistic realm into the academic realm to get health insurance, income to provide? Just as much chance of getting a big grant. Both require applications and schmoozing.

Maybe this is all justification for laziness. Artistic high road and all that. Even now all these thoughts/emotions I don't want to bother to craft into a polished blog post. But isn't this more just for me as a place to vent?

No one reads this anyways...


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